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Salary: USD 124,000 - 186,000 / annual
Zipline is the world's largest drone delivery service, operating autonomous logistics systems across four continents. The company delivers critical supplies—blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products—with a delivery occurring somewhere in the world every 30 seconds. Zipline has completed millions of deliveries and safely flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles.
As Technical Release Manager, you will own the end-to-end release process for Zipline's software, hardware, and integrated autonomous systems. This role combines hands-on release management with technical program management, requiring you to define release scope, align cross-functional teams, and drive execution through validation, sign-off, and deployment.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the complete release lifecycle across a portfolio of software and system releases, managing scope, content, configuration, schedule, validation, risks, and readiness from planning through deployment
- Serving as the expert on release content and configuration, including release-defining changes, hardware-software compatibility, cross-system dependencies, and downstream impact
- Coordinating release activities across component teams and downstream consumers, aligning dependencies with release milestones
- Assessing release readiness, anticipating risk, and developing mitigation strategies across teams
- Leading cross-functional release forums to drive clear decisions, ownership, and accountability
- Identifying and owning technical projects that resolve major inefficiencies in the release process
- Improving release metrics, dashboards, and tools to provide engineering, operations, and leadership with data-backed assessments of release health
You will bring structure to ambiguity, surface risk early, establish clear ownership, and drive complex issues to conclusion. Beyond recurring releases, you will lead cross-functional projects that improve release efficiency and precision.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's or master's degree in systems engineering, computer science, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 3+ years of experience as a Technical Program Manager, Release Manager, Systems Engineer, or related role
- Experience in aerospace, autonomous vehicles, robotics, or other safety-critical hardware-software systems
- Working knowledge of software configuration, change, and release management (version control, branch strategy, traceability, compatibility management)
- Familiarity with systems engineering concepts including verification and validation, safety and risk assessment, requirement-to-test traceability
- Technical fluency across complex hardware-software systems with ability to evaluate dependencies and facilitate technical tradeoffs
- Demonstrated ability to lead specialized domain experts, facilitate technical and nontechnical discussions, and drive decisions without direct authority
- Proactive risk identification and sound judgment in fast-moving environments with incomplete information and competing constraints
- Excellent written and verbal communication, translating technical status and risk for diverse audiences
- Experience with project, requirements, change, and configuration-management tools
